Both Google and the USPTO are officially insane. Can anyone see where the patent wildly crosses the the line? Whilst the GMail user has agreed to have the privacy reamed the other person or persons at the end of the email or those who replay to a GMail address have not, thus an extreme invasion of privacy. This would be akin to the patents office granting the US postal service a patent for the ability to scan and read al mail that passes through it's service on the claim that buying a stamp means you agreed to all the terms and conditions of service of the US postal service.

There is always another party to that email, so at which point does the sender own the rights to privacy and at which point does the receiver take over that right or can it be legally implied that both own the right to that privacy and both must agreed to have it reamed prior to any company being allowed to do it.

Especially consider this on the reply, fuck Google, just because I send an email to a GMail address does absolutely not mean, I gave them the right to have my privacy reamed by the to their greedy and perverted little heart's content.

I fail to see how "show an advertisement based on message content" is either inventive or non-obvious to an expert in the field.

Apparently you've not studied quantum mechanics. Some interpretation of quantum mechanics state that everything that can happen does. So, much like we have the EM field and Higgs field, etc. and interactions between them make up reality, there is an infinite number of Universes that could have emerged from the big bang with all sorts of different parameters for all sorts of fields. It's widely known that the standard model is a very good approximation, but still a bit incomplete.

bullshit, legal decisions like this, as much as I despise them, should be about law and not ethics. Your personal code of conduct and morality is not MY personal code of conduct and morality. The same goes with a patent clerk and someone applying for a patent. The moral issue should be taken up by the people effected and seek damages from the offending party. Or, you could just refuse to use google services.

My personal code of conduct is not Stalin's personal code of conduct. I am right, he was wrong. So are you. Only mentally deranged people are moral relativists. That or libertarians but I repeat myself.

I suppose it's easy to divide everything into black and white when you (in all likelihood, given your hilarious outlook) get your ethics/morality given to you in a book. If morality isn't relative, that means that there are billions of people out there who constantly do things that are against their moral compass. When you get down to it, morality is a concept that humanity has created, and it means whatever we choose it to mean. Sometimes we go with the group consensus, but often it's a personal thing. Wha

How about a compromise (that should get both sides to down vote me to oblivion...)
Patent law should be about technical merits. Tort law covers ethics. It is ok to own a patent on "insert some horrible and amoral process here", but it is illegal to use it. This is the legal equivalent to breaking a function into two separate functions, each one serves a purpose and is not overly obfuscated. We just have to remember to call both functions.

True... both google & patent office are amoral if anything, but certainly not insane - this will be quite profitable for google.
From a non-patent point of view, this email thing seriously creeps me out.
I wonder if the Google CFO's business card says "Chief Ferengi Officer".
*shrug* That is probably true for any large company.

So anyway... now that lavabit is gone, what is a good way to go for private email ?

Patents are, and should be, about technical issues only, legality and ethics does not enter into the decision over whether something is patentable.

You raise some good points. I don't use Facebook because I don't like being a product. I make a modest effort to avoid web tracking (firefox w/collusion, request policy, noscript). I run bleachbit once a month or so.

The email thing bothers me because I don't see that I have much control over it.

A side effect of my thinking about this is I end up being depressed about where things are going.
Just for fun, let me add an oprtion or two to your well-reasoned choices:
[_] Check this for a smart phone that

Given all of that, if advertisements are unavoidable I'd prefer random advertisements that are totally untargeted to who I am and what I do. I know, I know, that is "unprofitable" for the service providers and merchants.

You really woud rather have a penis enlargement ad, nsfw banner or pyramid scheme ad instead of whatever it is you get? You know that no matter how good the offer they're showing you are not required to click, or spend money, on it, don't you?

Patents are, and should be, about technical issues only, legality and ethics does not enter into the decision over whether something is patentable.

Ethics possibly not, but a patent has to be for a useful invention, and if what the patent enables me to do was illegal, then I could never legally do it, so the invention wouldn't be useful and couldn't be patented.

Both Google and the USPTO are officially insane. Can anyone see where the patent wildly crosses the the line? Whilst the GMail user has agreed to have the privacy reamed the other person or persons at the end of the email or those who replay to a GMail address have not, thus an extreme invasion of privacy. This would be akin to the patents office granting the US postal service a patent for the ability to scan and read al mail that passes through it's service on the claim that buying a stamp means you agreed to all the terms and conditions of service of the US postal service.

There is always another party to that email, so at which point does the sender own the rights to privacy and at which point does the receiver take over that right or can it be legally implied that both own the right to that privacy and both must agreed to have it reamed prior to any company being allowed to do it.

Especially consider this on the reply, fuck Google, just because I send an email to a GMail address does absolutely not mean, I gave them the right to have my privacy reamed by the to their greedy and perverted little heart's content.

Technically, email is like sending postcards - it's complete;y open for anyone to read. (Although few do because who has the time to really read every single postcard sent through the mail? The NSA, perhaps).

Email has no technical privacy - it never has. Even in the beginning it was typically available to anyone who had access to the system it's on (back when people logged onto a shell account to retrieve their mail, sysadmins would have free reign over the entire firesystem).

If you wanted privacy, use encryption - it's one of the initial uses of PGP - for encrypting email!

And you're technically correct - in fact there's a class action over this by non-Google users finding that they're being profiled and tracked because they interact with GMail users and even worse, they aren't covered by any of Google's privacy policies because they never agreed to them.

That's funny, but PGP was designed with the assumption that communications and email storage can easily be snooped on. It's an end-to-end scheme, and so is S/MIME. The security of both is as good as the encryption algorithm and your and your peers' procedures for key management and exchange.

If a government (to me, the U.S. government agencies are agents of a foreign state) wants the contents, they need to go after you, rather than installing blanket wiretaps at your service providers and silencing their sta

The recipient and sender addresses are still publicly readable, though. Sure, they could just tap the internet line itself, but it is more fun to thug it up and threaten people. Then they install logging software onto the servers themselves gives them a nice easy way to build massive graphs of who is talking to whom. Furthermore, they can log all the encrypted emails and, if they ever suspect some individual person, attempt to hack into the persons computers to get their public/private keys. Also, they

Technically, email is like sending postcards - it's complete;y open for anyone to read. (Although few do because who has the time to really read every single postcard sent through the mail? The NSA, perhaps).

A postcard isn't open for anyone to read. It's only open to read for the very few people who touch it while in transit from the sender to me. And I'm quite sure there is some amount of legal protection. If you stood in front of my house waiting for the postman and asked him to let you read postcards to me, I'm quite sure that would be illegal.

Email has no technical privacy - it never has. Even in the beginning it was typically available to anyone who had access to the system it's on (back when people logged onto a shell account to retrieve their mail, sysadmins would have free reign over the entire firesystem).

System Admins still have full access to all file-systems under their control so you have to hope that they have enough integrity not to abuse their privilege. it is possible for a rogue System Admin to write filters to extract compromising email however if they are caught doing this then they can face a prison sentence and/or a hefty fine.

Actually pretty much all outgoing and incoming business or corporate email is actually read by virus protection software no matter if the mail server runs a Microsoft, U

Email has no technical privacy - it never has. Even in the beginning it was typically available to anyone who had access to the system it's on (back when people logged onto a shell account to retrieve their mail, sysadmins would have free reign over the entire firesystem).

Back when people typically logged onto a shell account to retrieve their mail, sysadmins didn't even have to go to their homedir to snoop on them, because users had their own mbox file in the spool dir.

However, they didn't have free reign over the filesystem. They either had free rein across it, or they reigned over it. HTH.

The fact that email is sent _en clair_ over the wires is not an argument for it being open. The reason is simple: unlike a postcard where one need only look at it, to read someone's email somebody has to find it and open it up with a text viewer, which is a physical act - and this act is analogous to opening an envelope. Until it's opened all that's seen is a filename or header, which is akin to the address on the outside of an envelope.

Oh, and on those Google patents? They're bullshit. Now, thanks to the bright lights at the patent office, patented bullshit, just like so many of the others that are obvious, prior art, or "because computer|Internet|cloud".

Out of curiosity, what is your position on the non-advertising content suggestions mentioned in the patent? For example, if someone e-mails an address to a Gmail user, does it constitute reaming of the sender's privacy for Google's systems to recognize that it's an address and to offer the user a map?

What about other sorts of automated analysis not mentioned in the patent? For example, content analysis for automatic classification, such as the priority inbox feature which sorts e-mail into "important" and "everything else" categories, or the new inbox that optionally sorts e-mail into "primary", "social", "promotions", "updates" and "forums" categories, presented on different tabs. Is that reaming of the sender's privacy, too? The content analysis seems like it would be quite similar in procedure, just a different application. Probably a bit more personalized than the advertising analysis, actually.

While I'm at it, what about automated content analysis for spam filtering and virus detection? Is that also privacy reaming?

I'm curious where you draw the line, and on what basis. Personally, I don't see any sort of automated analysis whose results are presented only to the recipient of the e-mail as a breach of privacy of the sender, who sent the information to the recipient. I draw the line based on who sees the information, both original and the results of the analysis, and especially on what information made available to third parties can be tied to the people/accounts from which it originated or to which it is related. On that basis, I don't see any privacy issues with Gmail.

But others see things differently, so I'd like to understand what your criteria are.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, though the above represents only my personal opinion, not any sort of company policy statement. For that matter, I held the same opinion before I began working for Google, so I can safely say that my employment has not altered it.)

when they analyze your data so that they can sell you to advertisers, remember with google you are their product! their method is to build a profile of you based on your communications that they can sell to advertisers and target you for advertising, this is not simply some filtering system like a spam filter, it is a system to catalog every bit of information about you to be able to understand who you are, what you do, where you go, what interests you have and who you communicate with so they can sell you

I think the wording of this statement is misleading. It implies that some information about you is being sent to advertisers, which is not the case.

their method is to build a profile of you based on your communications that they can sell to advertisers

And again, this is not the case. Google doesn't sell user profiles to advertisers.

this is not simply some filtering system like a spam filter, it is a system to catalog every bit of information about you to be able to understand who you are, what you do, where you go, what interests you have and who you communicate with so they can show you more effective advertising.

I changed the bolded words in your statement, to make it more accurate. Yes, Google's intent is to understand you in some depth, in order to both provide you with better services, and to show you advertising that is relevant to your interests.

Of course, if you don't want targeted advertising from Google, you're free to opt out [google.com], even while still receiving the free services.

Does this corrected understanding of what Google does and doesn't do change anything for you? Based on the line that I described in my previous post (GP to this one), it makes all the difference to me. If that's not where you draw the line, I pose the same question to you that I posed to rtb61: Where do you draw the line? Is analysis for the purpose of targeted advertising different from analysis for spam filtering or automatic categorization, and, if so, why? Is it just a distaste for advertising driving your attitude, or is there actually some privacy consideration that I'm missing?

Oh, one more comment: I should also mention in the interest of full disclosure that I find targeted advertising to be a good thing. I don't particularly like ads, and I'd rather not see them at all, but given that advertising is the model that pays for pretty much all of the web content I enjoy, since I have to see ads I'd much rather see ads about things that actually interest me.

This was driven home a couple of days ago when I was semi-forced to watch TV for a few hours, during the afternoon. One partic

Okay, so you like interest-based ads. I can see that, I really can. What I'm afraid of, though, is that you with your interest and I with mine get presented a different internet. Google probably sorts your search results differently than mine, so you'll visit different sites than I do, even though our search terms are the same.
Maybe this isn't a big deal. Your perception of the world is different than mine, so why wouldn't you visit a different internet than I do? But where do you draw the line? (right back at ya:) )
Also, my interests are shaped based on what I see and read on the internet (as well as IRL of course), but if only pages/search results based on my current interests are ever presented, can I ever widen my horizon? I'm not a static set of properties.

Okay, so it probably isn't this bad yet, but I'm a little worried about where this is going. Thanks in any case for your view on this.

Yes... Which are male, single, under 30 interested in cars.
Please note, that private information is only the information that can personally identify you. Unless you happen to live in a country/city that has you are the only person fitting that profile, you have no basis to claim that your private information is sold.

In short - Google offers no more information than you can't already gather from other sources, concerning low volume demographics.
Consider that you are targeting a DnD players in Boulder(CO), going through Google is the least efficient tools that you could use to get personal details about your target group.
Targeting any group larger than that is pretty much useless and you can't practically gather any valuable personal information.

As one of the probably-millions of people who buys google advertising, I'd love to know where I can find this supposed trove of personal profiles to target. It'd make my adwords a lot more effective than all this blind keyword bidding.

Actually that information will help greatly in sorting the emails. Some people I'm in contact with routinely send me stupid email and happen to be business associates. I do not want to go through their cupcake bake-off blabber, to see that they have sent me estimates for projects.

I don't see any sort of automated analysis whose results are presented only to the recipient of the e-mail as a breach of privacy of the sender, who sent the information to the recipient.

But the information is also shared with the NSA and law enforcement agencies. We know that already. It could (and likely will) be used for proactive punishment of thought crimes.

Moreover, what you call "content analysis" is also a technical term from the intersection of corpus linguistics and psychology. Just by analysing text you can obtain a complete and fairly accurate personality profile of a person. Try out for example LIWC [liwc.net] and see for yourself.

If your definition of "read" includes "being processed by a computer" then any email server that accepts an email from you must necessarily read your email. If your definition of "read" does not include "being processed by a computer", then Google is in fact not reading your email. Either way, you are completely misunderstanding what this story is about and what the privacy implications are.

In other words: name even a single way in which your privacy is being violated by there being relevant ads in your GMail or in someone else's GMail? The Google data center that decided which ad to show you already has your email, so Google is not getting any additional information from you when it selects or shows this ad to you. Advertisers don't get to see your email and they don't get to know who you are, so there is no information being leaked about you to third parties.

You might not like Google having your email in the first place when you send email to someone on GMail, but that is how email works. If you send an email to a server, that server has your email. That's what email is! In any case, since you aren't being shown ads when yous end email to GMail users, that concern would have absolutely nothing to do with being shown ads on GMail, which is what this Slashdot story is about.

Whilst the GMail user has agreed to have the privacy reamed the other person or persons at the end of the email or those who replay to a GMail address have not, thus an extreme invasion of privacy.

If you send an email to gmail.com, gmail.com can read it. Is this really a big surprise in a technical forum? In fact, gmail.com must be able to read the email in order to deliver it to the right mailbox. It must be able to read the body of the email if you want it to perform spam detection. It's the same for pretty much every domain, as almost everyone uses some form of spam detection.

Only the naive or the wilfully ignorant could claim that they didn't expect Google to be able to read emails sent to their

Listen up and listen up good. There are plenty of things I do that I prefer not to do and screw you if you think I just have to suck it up with out doing what ever I can do to change it and if I bloody wish, spend the rest of my life continuing to attempt to change it. I'll send email to a GMail address but make not mistake I will spend the rest of my life opposing the idea that they are entitled to read and analyse anything beyond the addressing. Personally I would like to see a new email encryption stand

Listen up and listen up good. There are plenty of things I do that I prefer not to do and screw you if you think I just have to suck it up with out doing what ever I can do to change it and if I bloody wish, spend the rest of my life continuing to attempt to change it.

If you send me a letter, I am allowed to show it to anyone I want. I can even hire a service to open my mail, sort it, and toss the junk. Is that illegal? Should you be able to prevent me from doing that?

If you send an email to my gmail address, guess what happens? Guess who I authorized to read and sort MY mail, for the cost of some targeted ads?

Please stop trying to control what I can do with MY email that people sent to me. I always hear that the government is the one trying to take our rights, but t

Somehow you bring to mind the kind of douche nozzles that thinks it's appropriate publish nude photo's that their ex-girlfriends sent them. Once it is in you grubby little mitts, does not mean you can do what ever the hell you fell like doing with it.

Get over it dude. If people, other than privacy nerds, were remotely concerned about this then we'd get Yahoo/MS/etc. promoting some sort of auto-reply system that sent back a "Sorry, the email service you have sent this email from scans replies for advertising purposes and, as such, is a danger to my privacy. Please send this email from an email service that does not scan my emails and I will reply to your message". Almost all email services, free or not, probably provide for this very easily. Then Gmail w

... would be akin to the patents office granting the US postal service a patent for the ability to scan and read al mail that passes through it's service on the claim that buying a stamp means you agreed to all the terms and conditions of service of the US postal service.

This is actually a solid business idea, extending what Google does with email to Snail mail. Just think about how much this could improve targeted mail (junk mail) by sharing keywords in your mail with advertisers. All that would be needed is technology to scan through paper envelopes.

Patents have nothing to do with morality or otherwise. Personally I would rather Google have this patent, then say, some patent troll company that will sell the patent to the highest bidder, say, some Chinese state run company.

Also I can't stand how much FUD is said about Gmail and its lack of "privacy". No HUMAN has ever read your email, ever, it doesn't happen. Google uses cold impersonal computers and algorithms to quickly scan text for keywords and then suggests ads that are relevant because they hav

Meh I use Bing, I figure if somebody is gonna make money off my searches the least they can do is give me a slice and all those $5 Amazon gift cards are great for picking up the little adapters and odds and ends i'm always needing round the shop. Plus I like their image search better than Google.

As for TFA this just shows that the USPTO has basically become a rubber stamp for the corps, frankly the whole copyrights and patents system need to be tossed out and overhauled, all it does now is make rich old w

Unfortunately DDG's results are pretty terrible. I find it pretty much unusable, specially because it tends to turn your search for a software package with a "common" name, to only turn out results from the common name (IE try to look for Lua and you get sites that use the Portuguese word for moon), whereas google will usually link to Lua's official site.

Me too! It is a bit hilarious that Google is obviously still trying to quash scroogle years later by trademarking the name, as if they would like to erase it from history.
Instead, everytime I hear the word I think of scroogle, and wonder if there is a good way to bring something like that back.
I use DuckDuckGo (after trying many of the others like PrivateLee, etc.) but I'm really not happy with it. Their search engine disregards a lot of standard searching techniques. For instance, if I search for som

What I would like to see is a browser/scraper that sits on my own computer (not the cloud or a web server) so I can have complete control over it

This is really clever. The era of ethical computing services is yet upon its dawn. Find a way to monetize the idea and it just might make you rich. Remember, people said there was no (ethical) way to monetize search when google was getting started. They were (right) wrong!

Technically speaking, there's no reason all the end clients need to scape the web. The scraper could be completely centralized, but you'd run searches against a local database which is downloaded every couple days. All web searches c

Those show nothing of the sort. Wish someone would actually read the materials before writing the summary.

Well, the second image does show ads for Filemaker and Peoplesoft, sandwiched between ads for help with learning or using Access. The Filemaker ad specifically positions it as an alternative to Access, and it can be assumed that the Peoplesoft ad is also offering an alternative, though I don't really see Access and Peoplesoft as competitors.

The first image is an example e-mail that actually suggests that Excel and Access files are so valuable to the business that they should be protected from loss by gett

How is this remotely patentable? It is just taking some content, and presenting an ad based on the content (and keywords in the content). What does it mater that the content is a reply vs a web page vs anything else?
Ohhh "determining reply content associated with the reply" If only three was some standard way to determine the content of an email. What is novel about this? Once you have a system to provide an ad based on keywords, what does it matter if you pull keywords from a reply, or from something else?

They did not patent the concept of targeting ads based on content. They patented a particular method for doing that.

And their particular method is different from the other methods how? Reading the patent, about the only thing that is different is that they use the reply as the content.
The method involves using keywords from the content. Applying some sort of weighting that meets a threshold, and a few other things. How does this method differ from a method to introduce advertising based on other content?
Surely figuring out the reply isn't novel. Surely looking for keywords isn't novel. Surely weighting isn't novel. Th

At least one could imagine a significant potential benefit for this (even if outweighed by the negatives), and it required a bit of innovation. The one-click purchase (where you don't get a confirmation) always seemed crazy to me - like inventing an automobile without brakes so that it always has to be coasted to a stop.

You have got to be kidding me. Are you such an apologetic fanboy that you believe Google's focus is helping people with cancer and disorders? If someone did have breast cancer, they would mostly see targeted spam ads telling them of a magic cure for 9.99.